Notes

Séamas Ennis asks Joe if he knows anything about the tune ‘Port na Giobóige’. Joe tells him that the story concerns a widow with two sons, Tadhg and Dónall. The sons are in the field binding sheaves of oats, while their mother sits indoors, spinning. The sons bring one of the sheaves up to the door of the house and dress it in a man’s suit, as if it were a suitor for their mother’s hand. She spins for all she is worth inside the house.

This is the tune which Joe lilts in the middle of the story of Casadh an tSúgáin when the old woman in that story starts getting ‘dangerous’, as he puts it.

Recorded by Proinsias Mac Aonghusa for RTÉ from Joe Heaney and Séamas Ennis during the 1960s. We are grateful to RTÉ for allowing us to provide this recording here.